Vacation slide and extension - reserve
 

New guy here,

Saw a couple post about this that are pretty old so figured I’d ask just to make sure. I have vacation starting may 7th, a few of the reserve lines I’m bidding have a 7 day gap between R-days so the 5 day slide will be short by 2 days to touch the other days. I read through the contract and it mentions a 3day extension based on 7 days of vacation. Is this accurate, I would be able to slide it 5 days and then extend it up to 3 days? Just want to make sure I understand correctly before I screw up my vacation month :(

Thanks in advance!

One more thing, does the slide / extension drop the entire block of reserve days or just the days it touches? Plus buffer

If you’re on jetflyers a great explanation was just posted.

I’m not, but I will be now. Thanks!

As far as I know, vacation expansions only apply to lineholders, not reserve lines. You can still slide 5 days either side though. If the 7 day vacation block doesn’t touch 7 R-days you can go in and request which days you would like dropped, as they will take the required R days from somewhere. You will get reserve leveling for those days from the first day of the bid period. Any unused credit (~4:45ch/Rday vs 6ch day vacation) can be bought back at the end of the year if you’re under the max buyback

Thanks for the information!

The way I think of vacation and reserve is this:
You can’t have a day off you would have had on your schedule anyway count as a vacation day.
So even if all 7 of your Vaca days fell on days off, you would still have 7 R-days removed from your schedule. Sliding or bidding a reserve schedule that conflicts with all or some of your vaca days just gives you control over what days are actually remove. Otherwise, that is up to scheduling. You can enter an input but it’s just a request. They have the ultimate decision.

Extending vacation is just a math problem resulting from the fact that a vacation day is worth 6CH and an r-day is usually 4.5-ish CH. It is done by using the actual vacation hours your Vaca is worth divided by r-day value to determine how many extra r-days you can knock out. Contract is pretty clear on now to calculate that.

Make your choice via vips during the conflict window between this afternoon and Saturday morning. Any days removed via extension are also just a request from you. Days will get removed according to the formula but may not be the ones you want removed.

To add on,
In general, for a week of vacation you can Extend (add) an additional 3 days off.

For a 19 day month, that leaves you with 9 days of reserve to sit, somewhen, somewhat at the mercy of CRS. In General, I’ve had great success with CRS honoring my requests.

Sliding/keeping/waiving buffers controls the days that CRS are prohibited from placing an R day when they reconstruct your R line during the processing window.

And, in a recent grievance win, if you keep the buffers, CRS is prohibited from moving an R day into the buffer during the flying month

Thanks everyone for the help! Definitely have a better understanding of it now, at least a tiny bit better :)

I got asked this question and couldn't find a definitive CBA reference.

Do we get paid for R-days knocked out by the 48-hour vacation buffers?

i.e.
A pilot has vacation that starts on Wed and goes for 7 days. He has 19 days of reserve starting Mon (two days before his vacation starts) and didn't waiver the buffers.

He can extend by 3 days, knocking out 10 R-days. His buffers on either end will knock out 4 more R-days. According to the contract, his vacation bank will be charged 10 x R-day value (4:46 this month), so about 47:60.

He's going to end up with 5 R-days left on his calendar. Assuming he sits reserve for those 5 days, is he going to get paid the full RLG for his reserve line?